Dave Naffziger's Blog

In the WSJ’s premium, above-the-fold image ad block (the only one):

That giant flushing sound is the WSJ’s ad revenue…

Both are nearly always useless, but are often used heavily in the marketing or sale of products and services. However, SLAs are frequently demanded by businesses. What gives?

But my tire has an 80,000 mile warranty
Read the fine print on your tire warranty. Here are a few snippets from Goodyear’s warranty:

Tires not eligible for replacement [greater than 2/32” of treadwear or 12 months] … will be replaced with a comparable Goodyear tire on a prorated basis. Replacement price will be calculated by dividing the tire’s retail price at the time of adjustment by the percentage of usable tread that has been worn off…You pay for mounting and balancing and any applicable taxes.

So, if your tire dies (due to normal wear and tear) at 70K miles in the middle of nowhere, you get a 8.75% discount on a new tire… if you can prove that you did all of the proper rotating, have your original invoice, etc. There is no compensation for you hassle or even the additional cost of having to put no tires on.

But my hosting SLA says I get 99.999% uptime
The crux of the reason why most SLAs are useless is that they have no teeth. Let’s look at Rackspace’s SLA (which guarantees 100% network uptime):

Upon experiencing downtime, Rackspace will credit the customer 5% of the monthly fee for each 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100% of customer’s monthly fee for the affected server).

If the Rackspace datacenter goes down again, and you lose a day (or more) of business, all you get back is 1 month of hosting fees. I expect that Rackspace’s outage (or 365 Main’s) cost ill-prepared customers way more than a single month of hosting fees.

And therein lies the problem with SLAs. No reasonable service provider is going to contractually put their business on the line for each customer (for large customers, the actual cost of a network outage can be huge). Their primary (and fully aligned) motivation is that if their service sucks, customers will go elsewhere.

EC2 and AppEngine don’t have SLAs
This meme echoes around the blogosphere from time-to-time. Companies are uncomfortable running on EC2 because EC2 has no SLA or or comment on AppEngine’s lack of SLA for that matter.

SLAs rarely make a service. Instead evaluate the service and their historic performance. Understand how they are prepared for outages. What happens to them if their service goes down? I’d contend that Amazon would face such a crisis of confidence that it would cripple their new offerings.

And do your own disaster planning.

Two reasons:

1. Asking catalog mailers not to honor CatalogChoice unsubscribe requests. These mailers send out 19B (yes, Billion) catalogs a year. The DMA sent a letter to their members asking them to ‘just say no’ to unsubscribe request from useful parties such as the non-profit Catalog Choice.
2. Getting off their frickin email list. Somehow I got subscribed to their email list. However, there isn’t just 1 list or 1 place to manage your subscriptions. So far, I’ve individually unsubscribed from 8 different lists, and I can’t find a single place to unsubscribe from them all. So far I’ve found DMA Information, DMA Seminars, DMA Products, Seminars, Conferences, Council Events, Council and Council Membership. Its aggressive spam-boxing for now.

Based on a recommendation from a friend a while ago, I began using Mozy for backing up my machines. I have been incredibly impressed and have recommended the service to anyone within earshot.

I had been using Sharpcast for photo backup, and using a Linksys NSLU2 and an external hard drive to conduct local backups. My initial excitement about Sharpcast quickly eroded as they abandoned the product and left all of the rough edges in place. I grew tired of the (slight) administration overhead of managing local backups and decided to give Mozy a try.

Mozy has been awesome for several reasons:

• It just works. Install the client and you can basically forget about it.
• Excellent interface. It is incredibly intuitive. I’ve always been able to quickly find the things that I want.
• Easy to retrieve backed up documents. Mozy offers a number of easy ways to get your backups. DVD, context menu, explorer extensions, website, etc.

I’m pretty convinced that there isn’t a better solution out there. However, Mozy doesn’t do the one thing that would be very useful: sync. And since they’ve been acquired by EMC, I don’t expect tremendous movement.

So, I’m pretty excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of Live Mesh. While GDrive remains as mythical as the ‘man-month’, MSFT is launching a beta of Live Mesh, a pretty ambitious Remote Desktop in the cloud (Good overview at TechCrunch). While I’m most excited by the ‘Unified Data Management’ of Live Mesh, I can definitely see the benefits of ‘unified’ every-thing else. It is a great desktop-up balance to the cloud-down approach taken by Google/Adobe. I tend to favor the ‘cloud-down’ approach but there are definitely instances where desktop-up are favorable (like document backup and sync).

I’m a very happy Mozy user at the moment and will continue to recommend it, but Live Mesh is the first offering that has the potential to dislodge it.

Update:

I take back all the good things I said about Mozy. Mozy actually sucks.

I’ve long been a fan of Amazon’s E2, S3, FPS, SimpleDB, etc. These services are changing the way that early-stage startups make their platform decisions.

News outlets are quickly picking up that tonight Google is launching a hosted platform for web developers: App Engine.

I’m extremely excited about this for several reasons:

• Google is one of a handful of companies that have truly understand Internet scale. In addition, they have regularly dealt with the challenge of taking a small application and scaling it very quickly (nearly all of Google’s acquisitions go through this)
• By offering application hosting, Google is stitching together many of the components that Amazon’s services provide, making app development even quicker.
• While Amazon has been doing a great job pushing itself, the competition will be great and will raise the bar.
• It started off with Python support and is modeled after Django (which BrandVerity is built on and I’ve been very impressed with)

I look forward to seeing AppEngine develop further. I’m especially curious what it will take to launch an existing Django application on AppEngine.

I also learned for the first time that Google uses Python internally for its scripting. I guess that could explain all of the Google Python developer ads that keep popping up in my gmail account.

Update: I took a look through the documentation and now have a better handle on how AppEngine operates. It definitely borrows a number of aspects from Django:

• Django Templating Engine: The SDK provides Django’s templating engine (although it allows others to be used). The engine has been criticized by purists for allowing too much logic in the presentation layer, however I’ve found that the templates allow sufficient logic (if statements, for loops) to actually build webpages, while preventing the more complex view logic from making it to the front-end (variable assignment, method calls, etc.)
• Similar modeling system: In Django, you define your model classes and the framework provides common object methods that handle the sql underneath. The AppEngine models look very similar although it looks like the similarities are only conceptual (they definitely don’t share the same code and are interacted with in different ways). I can easily see how frameworks like Django (or Rails) could be modified to treat App Engine as another storage backend.
• Similar request and user frameworks: Django provides a few frameworks that are commonly used request.user (via contrib.auth) and its session middleware. These handle things like authentication, permissions, cookies, etc. Google’s APIs seem to function pretty similarly, although this isn’t exactly groundbreaking as these frameworks are fairly standard.

I don’t see a way to run python scripts that are independent of web requests. The O’Reilly article suggests that developers may utilize EC2 for batch operations. However, I have to believe that Google will support batch processing in some form as this forms a critical component of just about any web application (and I’m sure they don’t want to encourage people to write batch applications that are initiated by get statements)

Our Costa Rica vacation got off to an excellent start as I was denied boarding at LAX (after flying the first leg from Seattle). Thanks to a United passport-scanning kiosk, my passport has had a small tear in it for a few months now. The tear has slowly grown as careless airline personnel swept it through their readers. I’ve gotten a few second glances from passport control, but no one felt it necessary to even suggest I replace it.

Is the quick-print photo lobby that strong?
By the time that TACA airlines got through with my passport late last night, they had increased the tear to a full 1.5 inches along the front cover. At which point, they refused to allow me on the plane.

TACA was the ‘operating airline’ for the latter half of our flight. They were unable to do anything with our tickets so they sent us to United. The United desk agents refused to believe that I could replace my passport in a day. They wouldn’t book us on the next flight - they just offered to ‘annotate our record’ to make rebooking easier. A bit of gentle insistence and they finally gave us a reservation on the next flight.

The passport office will only do same-day passports if you can prove you need same-day passports (eg show a ticket or reservation). United almost put me in an unwinnable situation. If I had listened to United the first, second and third time they refused to put us on the next flight, we would continue to be stuck in LA at a ghetto airport hotel.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest the armpits of United’s employees and those of its subsidiaries
The uneducated consumer consistently gets screwed by the airlines. Every time something goes wrong, their default decision is to screw the customer. No wonder they’re going bankrupt. Its hard to run a successful business when your best customers (I’m a Premiere Executive) passionately hate you.

BTW, my collection of lessons learned is here: Getting a same-day passport